Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Compaction and High Traction

Since hanging out a bit more at Living Sims, I've become a CC junkie yet again. I really must stop at this point. It's getting ridiculous.

I spent part of my morning making four .package files out of tons of others, trying to organize them in a way that made sense, but not sure I've achieved that. Anyway, I knew I needed to do it since my game was lagging pretty badly.

I have also spent time in the last couple of days installing Twallan's Overwatch mod - ran the game once since installing and it cleared out a bunch of cars for me, so that's cool. And I saw someone mentioning something called "TuneUp" on some forum somewhere as being a helpful program for optimizing your computer and helping with laggy game play, so I went to check it out. I've installed the 15-day trial version and have just spent the better part of an hour going through the settings and optimizing my entire computer.

I know that sounds onerous, but here's the thing: TuneUp runs in the background and you can set it to "Turbo Mode", which shuts off all your non-essential services so that you have more resources devoted to whatever you're working on. ("Working" on... right. Or playing, as the case may be...) It never turns anything essential off, just stuff you wouldn't need for short periods of time.

So with this program, I've cleared out a bunch of crap from my registry, I found out I could tweak my browser and internet settings to match the actual speed of my connection (I had no idea!) and yes, I'm getting faster surfing happening! It only took me so long because I'm both picky and paranoid when using these kinds of programs. However, so far, so good, and I'm pretty pleased with it. I may end up shelling out the bucks for it if the next 15 days show marked performance improvement. :)

I'd launch The Sims and give it a good test run now that I've compacted all those files and can use Turbo Mode - but my daughter would kill me. I'm supposed to be doing Christmas prep. LOL Good thing she's around to keep me on track!

I'll be sure to report back on how this has all worked out for game play!

3 comments:

  1. I'm looking forward to hearing how it goes, WebbyMom. My computer can get mighty laggy sometimes, browsing and playing the Sims. Do you know if there's a tutorial somewhere on compacting .package files? I've heard of people doing that but was hesitant because I like to comb through my CC every so often and toss stuff I'm not using. How does it work if you want to get rid of something?

    And I know what you mean about accruing more CC since visiting Living Sims...I've become a full-on CC addict since I joined there. It's awful! ;)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, I have to say, it's been going pretty good tonight as I've been playing my "Greater Los Aniegos" world. I put my simself in there and she's been decorating and clubbing and writing novels - and every morning at 3:00AM I get a notice about cars being deleted and stereos being turned off, and it's been running pretty smoothly, considering all the CC I have commmmmmpressorized into a few packages. ;)

    Now, as for a tutorial... I did follow one, I'm sure, lesseee....

    Ah yes: This link at MTS was helpful:

    http://www.modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Improving_Sims_3_Performance

    Although I do believe that S3PE has been updated since then, as I didn't have to delete any files with "zero" values, and I had the choice to "auto save" when it was all done. However, it should be pretty easy to follow, nonetheless. :D

    If you want to toss things (assuming you're keeping your original separate files elsewhere as a backup): Go to your original files; toss what you want to toss; re-combine into new files.

    For this reason, I wish I'd filed my stuff differently - more like how aikea_guinea files his/hers, as "types" (like "curtains", "kitchens", "rugs", etc.) rather than by creator. However, I didn't, so for now, it is what it is in my game. ;)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks so much for the link, WebbyMom. I haven't had a chance to tackle this yet, but I do want to try it. Especially since I just keep downloading stuff right and left...my game is going to hate me! ;)

    ReplyDelete